Business Intelligence (BI) generally refers to a category of software systems and applications used to improve business enterprise decision-making and governance. These software tools provide techniques for analyzing and leveraging enterprise applications and data. These tools are commonly applied to financial, human resource, marketing, sales, service provision, and customer and supplier analyses. More specifically, these tools can include: reporting and analysis tools to analyze, forecast and present information, content delivery infrastructure systems for delivery, storage and management of reports and analytics, data warehousing systems for cleansing and consolidating information from disparate sources, and integration tools to analyze and generate workflows based on enterprise systems. Business Intelligence tools work with data management systems, such as relational databases or On Line Analytic Processing (OLAP) systems used to collect, store, and manage raw data and transactional enterprise systems that generate data. A subset of business intelligence tools are reports, OLAP systems, Enterprise Information Management (EIM) systems, Extract Transform and Load (ETL) systems, Dashboard, Analytics, and the like.
There are a number of commercially available products to produce reports from stored data. For instance, Business Objects sells a number of widely used report generation products, including Crystal Reports™, Business Objects Voyager™, Business Objects Web Intelligence™, and Business Objects Enterprise™. As used herein, the term report refers to information automatically retrieved (i.e., in response to computer executable instructions) from a data source (e.g. a database, a data warehouse, a plurality of reports, and the like), where the information is structured in accordance with a report schema that specifies the form in which the information should be presented. A non-report is an electronic document that is constructed without the automatic retrieval of information from a data source. Examples of non-report electronic documents include typical business application documents, such as a word processor document, a presentation document, and the like.
Dashboards provide the user with a graphical user interface that enables a user to see key data items. A dashboard may be defined such that an individual can use the dashboard to track metrics associated with performance objectives. In this way, a dashboard can provide charts, gauges, traffic light visualizations and alerts that provide a quick summary of the degree to which performance goals are being met.
A report document may provide a similar interface to the underlying data as a dashboard. A report document specifies how to access data and format it. A report document where the content does not include external data, either saved within the report or accessed live, is a template document for a report rather than a report document. Unlike, other non-report documents that may optionally import external data within a document, a report document by design is primarily a medium for accessing and, formatting, transforming and or presenting external data.
A report is specifically designed to facilitate working with external data sources. In addition to information regarding external data source connection drivers, the report may specify advanced filtering of data, information for combining data from different external data sources, information for updating join structures and relationships in report data, and instructions including logic to support a more complex internal data model (that may include additional constraints, relationships, and metadata).
In contrast to a spreadsheet type application, a report generation tool is generally not limited to a table structure but can support a range of structures, such as sections, cross-tables, synchronized tables, sub-reports, hybrid charts, and the like. A report design tool is designed primarily to support imported external data, whereas a spreadsheet application equally facilitates manually entered data and imported data. In both cases, a spreadsheet application applies a spatial logic that is based on the table cell layout within the spreadsheet in order to interpret data and perform calculations on the data. In contrast, a report design tool is not limited to logic that is based on the display of the data, but rather can interpret the data and perform calculations based on the original (or a redefined) data structure and meaning of the imported data. The report may also interpret the data and perform calculations based on pre-existing relationships between elements of imported data. Spreadsheets applications Generally work within a looping calculation model, whereas a report generation tool may support a range of calculation models. Although there may be an overlap in the function of a spreadsheet document and a report document, the applications used to generate these documents contain instructions with express different assumptions concerning the existence of an external data source and different logical approaches to interpreting and manipulating imported data.
Reports, dashboards and other BI analytic tools often use graphical representations of data to help users understand and navigate data results. While current decomposition trees show the breakdown of basic information over a series of dimensions, they do not provide advanced data visualization. A user is generally supplied with raw data, possibly with a basic summary such as a count for individual dimension members. This does not provide the user with the flexibility to compare and aggregate data.
In view of the foregoing, it would be helpful to provide a solution that allows users to compare the breakdown of complex measures, such as profit, revenue, attrition, growth and the like, over a series of dimensions. Moreover, the flexibility to compare data for multiple measures and dimension members, aggregate data for a desired selection of dimension members and filter data would provide an improvement over existing techniques.